Opt-in instead of Opt-out

[Ly0n]

Jonathan Carter, project leader of Debian, has pointed out that the current opt-out is not an option for the project. How can we turn the current procedure into an opt-in? @cornerman @fdietze @kikass13

[fdietze]

A whitelist mode, where you have a file with email addresses of people/projects who want to receive donations.

[kikass13]

we should leave everything and accumulate the "money distributed" for users without actually paying them directly (at that point). We could notify people that their are eligible for the payout and once they accept, will receive whatever the system has distributed to them in the past.

That would mean, that we would save our transactions and payout whenever a person has decided that they want to receive stuff (they only have to accept once, so then normal flow could work after that)

[fdietze]

I see two problems with the approach of reserving the money until the users opt-in:

1. You need a database, which would bring lots of complexity into this distributed tool.
2. When reserving money
   a. you're either running out of funds early, without paying people, because most money is held back.
   b. or you're taking the risk of paying reserved money to someone else and then the reserved money is not available anymore

[Ly0n]

Here the feedback from the Debian project about LibreSelery and the pro and con of funded open source. @kikass13
https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2020/10/threads.html#00001

[kikass13]

@Ly0n
I mean ... the thread contains the same discussions everyone starts in regards to open source funding. Where no side has a clear concept of what can actually be viable for a community because its a huge gray area. I don't care about the debian support, I just like the idea of re-paying people a little bit for the work they did, so that discussion is meaningless to me (personally)

@fdietze

1. databases are not complex, we are carrying the weight of previous transactions (transaction history) anyways, because of the wiki documentation stuff. So the information has already been "saved" for transparency, using that as a means to "delay" payouts is simple.
2. both valid points, but reserving money is an option (which can be capped), in our current setup the money is gone anyways. So freezing the money instead of paying it has the same outcome = the money is gone for other users